At least I see an error, although “Couldn’t post. Tap to retry.” doesn’t seem accurate.

But, clearly, I “tap to retry.”

Interestingly, I have to click the red error message. But I have fingers rather than a super accurate stylus, so I first:

Click the post entry which selects the entry,

Click the hashtag, which takes me to a hashtag view,

Then finally manage to click the red text, which repeats the error cycle.

I didn’t hook up a proxy to the phone, so I don’t know if the same message is coming back from the server to the phone, but I’d count that as a usability bug since the error is misleading.

If I was a normal user, I’d contact support at this point, or give up.

Because I test things, I write a blog post and then contact support, sending them a link to this post.

I’m beginning to think that boundaries might be a pathology in Instagram though, because on the mobile app, when you create long description, there comes a point at which you can continue to type, but your letters are not visible in the editor. I assume they are there because my auto-complete keeps matching the words and when I delete letters I do have to press delete a lot, and auto-complete suggests I’m deleting, even though none of it is visible on screen. Again I haven’t fed this through a proxy so I don’t know if the mobile app truncates the description (because it isn’t all accepted and a description limit is enforced), or if the truncation happens on the server side. Again I’d count this as a usability bug because it impacts my usability of the editor.

Once again, knowledge of the dev tools helps identify defects, and supports you in your daily life.